Will business travel be grounded?

Renewed conflict in the Middle East is causing jet fuel prices to skyrocket and put some key air corridors under pressure. Airlines are responding to the crisis by trimming less profitable routes and adding surcharges.

Last week, Air Canada announced it was suspending services on six domestic and international routes. In the days that followed, Air Transat’s parent company announced it would be reducing the carrier’s capacity by six per cent, Westjet said it was consolidating flights on lower-demand routes and adjusting its summer travel services, and German airline Lufthansa cancelled 20,000 short-haul flights in Europe. The International Energy Agency said that Europe had about six weeks of jet fuel supplies remaining.

The longer the conflict goes on, it’s likely these types of announcements will continue, reducing options for both corporate and leisure travellers ahead of the peak summer season. For organizations in which business travel is a key element of operations, the upheaval may be becoming an HR issue, not just a logistics headache, according to Frank Harrison, Regional Security Director, Americas, for World Travel Protection.

“We have clients who are trying to reframe what is essential travel,” says Harrison. “They’re coming to us from a risk management perspective to establish if there are controls and barriers that they can engineer in to restrict travel.”

Prioritizing which meetings should be face-to-face

Harrison says the combination of higher prices and disrupted routes means organizations must be clearer about when in‑person presence is truly required. He points to meetings tied directly to contractual obligations, major financial decisions, business continuity or supply chain issues as the most defensible cases for travel, especially on routes where airlines have removed capacity or added multiple connections.

“When you look at the costs that are driving the price of tickets up, how essential is that travel?” says Harrison. “We went through the model of everything done virtually, and now we're going back to whether we need to dust off some of the [pandemic] stuff and get people back into that question of do you really need that face-to-face meeting?”

From Harrison’s perspective, HR has a central role in explaining those decisions. “The organization owns the risk of travel from a cost perspective, and then from the individual, they understand then why, if the travel is being denied, that's just not arbitrary but it’s based on the price of fuel going up and the actual risk to the organization for that travel to go ahead,” says Harrison.

Increased stress for business travellers

The reduction in travel options and increase in costs can have a ripple effect for employees who travel for business, as longer travel days, extra connections, and the growing risk of last‑minute cancellations can all compound fatigue for employees who are already on the road frequently. Harrison believes organizations should focus less on finding the cheapest fare and more on redesigning travel patterns to reduce disruption.

One option is to consolidate trips so travellers stay longer in‑region, work from a local office and cluster meetings, rather than flying in for a single day and immediately turning around, which can limit exposure to delays while justifying the higher ticket price to the business, says Harrison. It may also allow HR to dial back the overall number of trips without eroding client relationships, he adds.

The same forces behind business flight cancellations are hitting leisure travel, as employees confront higher fares, fewer direct flights and the possibility of sudden schedule changes. Harrison notes that airlines are already cancelling routes and individual flights when they can’t fill enough seats to make a trip financially viable, leaving travellers with fewer choices and less predictable itineraries.

Shift in vacation timing could affect workforce planning

That volatility is starting to change how employees think about vacations, with direct implications for workforce planning, says Harrison. “People are becoming their own travel managers per se when it comes to leisure,” he says. “They’re going to take the time to do the research. They’re going to find a good rate. They’re going to find good tickets. And then they’re going to schedule their travel based upon what they consider a fair price for a trip, and that will cause a shift in when standard vacation is taken.”

As airfare spikes at traditional peak periods, workers may opt out of the usual summer holiday or school break trip in favour of off‑peak windows, different destinations or promotions in the shoulder seasons, according to Harrison. Over time, he suggests, that shift could upset long‑standing norms in organizations that typically see predictable slowdowns at certain times of year.

As an example, Harrison describes a company that might historically encourage vacations in March or over the school summer break, but may find more employees pushing time off into late autumn or even the following year if prices look more favourable then. That could create pockets of high absences in months that used to be steady, complicating staffing and coverage planning, he says.

Rethinking schedules for remote projects

The impact of air travel volatility could be even sharper in sectors that rely on fly‑in, fly‑out schedules, such as mining, energy and large construction projects, says Harrison. “There are some operations that may be put into a position where it’s probably cheaper to charter the whole plane to bring their workforce in versus having people going in and out on commercial flights,” he says. In those cases, rising fares could push employers to rethink rotation patterns and the overall cadence of work and rest days to match a more concentrated flight schedule, he adds.

Harrison expects the short-term outlook for business travel over the short term to depend heavily on jet fuel prices, the availability of aircraft and the trajectory of conflicts affecting key aviation corridors. Those factors are largely outside employers’ control, but HR leaders still have levers to pull.

Organizations may need to revisit their travel policies to define “essential travel” in concrete terms, aligned with risk, revenue and operational continuity, says Harrison.

Strategic collaboration to plan for the worst

HR also will need to work closely with finance, procurement, and security teams to map critical routes for the business and identify where cancellations or re‑routing could cause the most disruption. Scenario planning around those pinch points can inform contingency plans, from redistributing client coverage to temporarily relocating key staff or shifting leadership visits to less affected hubs.

Workforce planning around employee vacations may also need a fresh look, with organizations building more flexibility into blackout periods and use workforce management tools to flag when too many employees are targeting the same time period. In some cases, that might mean allowing more winter or late‑year vacations while protecting coverage in months when operations are most exposed to travel risk.

“The airlines are the ones that are going to be the great limiting step that will drive the rates up, but also drive down availability, so that it may not be an option to travel on a specific route because there might not be any aircraft on it,” says Harrison.